You can NOT afford to duck this bill–it will follow you and hospitals are getting more and more aggressive with their collections.

As the bill is completely outrageous, your first step is to talk to the finances department and see what they will do to lower it. Make sure to inquire about “charity care” given your limited incomes.

You may also want to check out this site:

Note this new wrinkle in predatory collections:

IF you can have insurance, even only catastrophic coverage, you MUST. If you think this is bad, you have see NOTHING yet, my dear. I’d advise checking into an HSA:

Use something like ehealthinsurance.com to search for an HSA.

BTW, if you’d like to read a sensible plan for US health care, check out the PDF at this site:

Please do look at the links provided. You were lucky this time–it’s getting far worse and if you needed surgery, you can rest assured you’d have been looking at $50K easily for the surgeon and hospital. We MUST address this insanity before it’s too late.